A blog about saving money, making investments and living healthy

I launched a reselling business. I learned how to sell items on eBay and Craigslist and listed old goods that are still worth money.

I only have one pair of sneakers in my inventory, a pair of adidas NMD R1 Japan in triple black going for $270. I listed a bunch of other goods I own: comic books, graphic novels, video games, a MacBook from 2006 and anything I thought still had monetary value. My goal is to liquidate my possessions and use the capital to fill my inventory with sneakers, specialize in a product.

Selling products is my third revenue stream—the first being my day job and the second freelancing.

We entered the second quarter of 2018. I came up with a set of money-saving goals for this month to help me eventually achieve financial freedom–it starts with accomplishing small goals that snowball into large achievements. While it may not seem like much now, these accomplishments build the foundation for saying goodbye to financial troubles.

My goals for April are simple — save money, follow a budget and invest. Here are five goals I want to accomplish this April:

Manage personal income and expenses

Money management begins with recording and analyzing cash flow. Personal income statements detail cash flow and help to build budgets that work. Learn to use a personal income statement to your advantage and build a financial plan unique to you.

What’s a personal income statement? What benefit does it offer for financial management? I’ll answer these questions and use my income statement as an example to help you create your own.

Steady Plans to Earn Financial Freedom

We all want to earn financial independence. To live free from debt, work from home, and own your own business is a dream many people would love to live someday. I’ve set the goal to make that dream happen.

Since starting my blog back in December of 2015, I’ve definitely been busy. I haven’t quite reached my blogging goals—not by far—but I’ve learned a lot.

On the bright side, I’ve discovered lots of very good blogs and found inspiration reading countless posts. I’ve also found a job writing at a website marketing company, so I haven’t entirely been unproductive since graduating with my Bachelors of Arts in Literature and Writing. Now that I’m older, one thing is for certain: I want to be an independent business owner and work on the road.

With so many distractions in today’s society like social media and endless streaming services, it’s no wonder people have such a hard time getting a full night’s rest. Sleep, however, is very important to both a person’s physical and mental health. We spend about one-third of our lives asleep, and for good reason. Sleep is essential to the recovery process—it’s the time our brains shut down, our bodies build muscle and we process life using the subconscious.

Stress is Not a Bad Thing and Neither is Sleep

To improve, we undergo stress followed by rest. As much as many of us would love to take shot after shot of expresso and chase it with a gallon a coffee to get through the next few hours of work or study, it’s not in our best interest. Working too hard for too long overloads the brain and body and results in the opposite effect—the brain fails to retain information, the quality of work falters, and the body atrophies. It’s especially important to stretch your limits, but never to the point your threshold snaps.

Since it’s a known fact around my office that I love bananas (so much so that I’ve been called “banana-man”—I dig it), I get asked a lot, “why are bananas healthy?” In short, the benefits of bananas are bountiful. Bananas are an excellent source of energy as well as a reliable source of such vitamins and minerals as potassium and manganese.

Exploring the banana’s nutrition profile will give you greater insights into how much just one banana a day can benefit your health.

I’ve decided to take my blog from wordpress.com to wordpress.org using Bluehost as my registrar host. While I enjoyed the easy setup wordpress.com offers, their professional and business packages cost too much. Moving my domain to Bluehost and using the open source version of wordpress.org gives me greater customizability and tracking features, allowing me greater control over how I use my website at a much cheaper price.

It’s serious! Taking my blog from the easy-to-host version of wordpress.com to wordpress.org opens up so many doors—I can easily track user information without having to pay additional fees to add widgets and track my SEO scores using Google Analytics. Now I have complete control over of my website.

At the beginning of the month, I like to set attainable, measurable goals that I can track throughout the month. I also categorize those goals to focus on one area at a time when the time comes to handle those tasks.

Shortcomings and Triumphs

In 2017, I overcame a lot of challenges. I moved out, I traveled to Europe, and I made incredible strides in my writing ability—but these were not accomplished without having faced a few challenges. I made a lot of mistakes in 2017 as I’ve made in the past before that, but that’s not to say I haven’t done many things right. Those mistakes have taught me to look forward and continue pushing on. Having learned from my faults, I’ve made adjustments to my previous goals and set a new 12 for this upcoming year.

Last year, I made a few bad investments and I hurt my knee in April running 10 miles on the treadmill, automatically disqualifying me from two of my goals: run a half marathon and a regular marathon. I exacerbated the injury playing basketball and was sidelined for a long time. I was seeing results, but then reinjured the knee in October playing tug-of-war at a work event. I’m receiving physical therapy for my injury, which is good, but I need to be careful and nurse my knee until I’m able to start running again.